Know your story: Finding plot holes before they ruin your life

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. All month long, we’re talking about editing. After all, it’s half of what you do, when you’re a writer. Half of your life is about writing, and the other half is about editing. Okay, well maybe it doesn't take up your whole life, but sometimes it sure does feel like it.

Being that I’m up to my neck in edits for the finale of the Druid Novels, I thought this would be a fantabulous time to have some chats about editing, and what you should be looking for while you’re editing your first draft. I think that first edit is the hardest one, don’t you? There’s so much to look for, so much to check for, and so many things we have to go back and double check all the time, just to make sure everything is working the way it’s supposed to. The next round is much, much simpler.

Today though, let’s talk about some of the bigger things we need to keep our eye out for.

Big Plot Holes

Of course! We know this. There are always plot holes in first drafts. It’s nearly impossible not to have a plot hole, when it comes to a first draft. They’re always around, lurking in the shadows, making our lives difficult when we start editing…

And yes, you should be training your eye to find things like this—before you yourself realize that it might be a plot hole.

Remember when we talked about not generally remembering every single thing that you write? Well, that becomes the bane of my existence while I’m checking for plot holes, because I do it by trying to remember as much as I can about the story. They stick out like a sore thumb, if you remember your story well enough. Those that don’t stick out… well, they’re harder to locate. We’ll get to them in a bit.

The bigger plot holes are, a lot of the time, easy to spot. They’re a character being in two places at once, a thing that happens at one point in the story and happens again later on, a phrase that’s out of place and changes the whole meaning of your story’s ending—the list goes on and on, and if you know your story well enough, you won’t have difficulty finding them.

Thing is, a lot of those big plot holes are made via scenes that we actually really like. This tends to be a problem I have, while I’m editing. I come across a scene that I love, only to have to cut it because it creates a hole in the story I’ve so carefully crafted.

Well, it has to go. But I’ll keep a copy for myself, won’t I?

Plot holes, as we all know, are one of those things that readers can spot a mile off. They find a hole and they’ll shout down to the bottom just to hear the echo and alert everyone in the vicinity to the fact that there’s a hole in this story and the author didn’t notice before it got published. It’s annoying. In fact, it’s sometimes downright terrifying, when we draw near to publication day. And that’s why you need to learn how to spot them now, while you’re nowhere near publishing, while all you’re doing is running through a round of edits on a first draft.

Train your eye to find the things that don’t belong, to search for portions of the story that you just don’t remember being there nearer the end of the book. Remember the things you wrote, remember the story you loved while you were writing it, and you’ll have a much easier time of this.

[love]

{Rani Divine}